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On paper, it seems crazy to intertwine an opera seria by George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) with atonal melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). But the young creative types behind three-year-old Opera Erratica have turned this mashup into a mesmerizing evening of operatic performance art in an storage shed in the city’s west end.

At its opening performance on Sunday evening, the experimental staging was not perfect, but sheer imagination and two fantastic singers turned it into a memorable, intellectually provocative two hours.

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Orlando Lunaire interweaves Pierrot Lunaire — 21 poems by Albert Giraud, set to an atonal, speech-sung score by Schoenberg in 1912 — with excerpts from Handel’s Orlando, first performed in 1733. At play is the conflict of affections between three stock Italian commedia dell’arte characters.

The earlier opera contributes, among other characters, Orlando and Medoro, who flesh out Pierrot, personified by counter-tenor Scott Belluz. Soprano Carla Huhtanen serves as Schoenberg’s main narrator, as well as the voice of Arlecchino and Columbina.

The Schoenberg melodrama is as abstract as its cleverly constructed, angular music, while the emotionally charged arias from Orlando humanize the proceedings. The final aria, by Handel, completes a poetic circle, echoing Giraud’s opening poem.

Patrick Eakin Young’s clever direction divides the shed into four spaces: audience and traditional stage on one side of a scrim, which filters the view of a backstage, which serves up visual clues for subtext, and the small orchestra, made up of modern and period instruments along the back wall.

Even with an audience no more than an arm’s reach away, singers Huhtanen and Belluz inhabit their roles completely, and seamlessly overcome the many technical challenges in the contrasting musical scores. These have to be the bravest vocal performances we have seen in Toronto this year.

The only disappointment on Sunday was the orchestra.

The Schoenberg score, anchored in Peter Longworth’s piano part, was solid. The period-instrument side, pared down to the bare essentials, often sounded ragged and out of tune. Conductor Ashiq Aziz erred on the side of slowness, frequently sapping momentum.

But given the power of the staging and singers, the orchestra was easy to overlook.

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